Kansas City School District Loses Leader Who Began Turnaround Effort

John Covington recently resigned as superintendent of the Kansas City Board of Education.Credit
David Eulitt/The Kansas City Star, via Associated Press

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — John Covington arrived here two years ago with the promise of transforming a district that had become synonymous with the failures of urban education. He even managed to win support for his drastic recommendation to shut down nearly half its schools, saying it was a necessary step to achieve desperately needed stability.

Stability is not something the district had enjoyed for some time. In the previous four decades, the title of superintendent of the Kansas City Board of Education rotated through more than two dozen people, during which time reforms were offered and abandoned as student enrollment and performance declined.

And this summer, while negotiating a new contract, Dr. Covington talked of continuing with what has been one of the most aggressive turnaround efforts in the nation.

“It’s a big day for me, inasmuch as I have outlived the 18-month average of staying power and begin my third year in Kansas City,” he said at the beginning of his state of the schools address that detailed a long list of new reforms he described as “Transformation Phase II.”

Then last week, not long after students returned to the classroom, Dr. Covington abruptly resigned.

School board members said he told them he had not applied or interviewed for any jobs. But after several days of lobbying to get him to stay — the board refused to accept his resignation, and The Kansas City Star ran editorials urging him to reconsider — Dr. Covington made news again by accepting a high-paying job as the first chancellor of a statewide initiative intended to improve Michigan’s failing schools, starting with those in Detroit.

An interim superintendent from within the administration was named at the school board meeting Tuesday night. At the same meeting Airick L. West agreed to resign as board president, having been accused of accelerating Dr. Covington’s departure by meddling in superintendent affairs.

The move highlighted one of the less-publicized problems facing urban education — the average tenure of a big-city superintendent is 3.6 years, according to the Council of the Great City Schools. And currently at least 15 major school districts have vacancies in their top leadership post, the council said.

Dr. Covington declined to comment but said in a statement last week that he apologized “for the difficulties for which my resignation created.”

The reason, he said, was “the opportunity to help transform the lowest performing schools in Detroit and the State of Michigan, which are among the very lowest performing schools in the entire nation.”

Despite the rancor the resignation has caused, school and community leaders have pledged to stick with the policy changes laid out over the last two years, rather than turning over the district to another leader with another vision, emphasizing the importance of continuity, even if some momentum has been lost.

“This has all the appearances of history repeating itself, but it’s not,” said Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which has advised the district in the past. “The reforms have been more solidly institutionalized than anything they’ve seen before.”

Sly James, the new mayor of Kansas City, was among those expressing optimism.

“If everyone focuses on executing the plan that is already in place, even though Dr. Covington won’t be here, we should get through this relatively unscathed,” Mr. James said.

In a metro area offering an array of school districts and charter schools, the Kansas City School District has shrunk sharply over the decades, though it continued to build more schools because of an unprecedented influx of money from a desegregation lawsuit.

When Dr. Covington arrived, the district, facing a huge budget deficit, had just 17,000 students in 61 schools that collectively were more than half empty.

His solution — closing 26 schools and cutting a third of the district work force — passed by one vote on the school board with significant community support. His many other initiatives also passed, including grouping elementary school students by skill level rather than by grade, combining middle and high school and bringing in more than 150 Teach for America recruits.

The district balanced its budget for two straight years. And city residents, many of whom long ago had lost faith in school leaders, rewarded Dr. Covington with a school board more supportive of his agenda.

Now, among the most pressing concerns is whether the district, which had been cited for the high leadership turnover, will maintain its provisional accreditation needed to prevent a state takeover.

“He led us to believe he was here for the long haul and shared our investment in our children,” Ms. Grant said. “That turned out to be false.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 31, 2011, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Kansas City School District Loses Leader Who Began Turnaround Effort. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe